[SLL] Netbook?

[Jarod Wilson]

On Apr 1, 2009, at 2:05 PM, Vernon Van Steenkist wrote:
[...]
> The ASUS 10000 contains the
> Broadcom Wireless chipset, crap in my opinion, whereas the ASUS 900A
> contains the Atheros WIFI chip set - the best Linux support and best
> performance in my opinion.

If you're only comparing Atheros and Broadcom, sure... But support for  
Intel wireless chipsets is better than both of them. The Atheros stuff  
is still fairly immature, unless you're talking about the madwifi  
driver instead of the actually-really-open ath5k and ath9k drivers.  
The Intel drivers, including for the iwl5k and iwl4k series 802.11n- 
capable chips, are far more mature.

I had a spare iwl5350 card laying around, and replaced the Atheros  
card in my Aspire One with it. Not that the current generation of  
netbooks really benefit from 802.11n though...

[...]
> One of the nice things about the ASUS 900a is that it has a dedicated
> SD/MMC slot reader.

Most of the netbooks do. The 9" Aspire One has two.

[...]
> 1) No more wear and tear on the SSD since now only the read-only
>   SSD system partition is mounted.

I'm largely of the mind that the alarm over SSD wear and tear is  
bogus. I beat the living hell out of the SSD in my Aspire One running  
Fedora's development tree, doing regular package updates. No issues in  
about 6 months of use like that so far. Only time will tell how well  
it holds up to the continuing abuse, of course, but I'm hammering it a  
lot harder than the average user.

[...]
> 3) SD cards are cheaper to replace than worn out SSDs. Note that I
>   have not had any SD card fail on me yet.

Honestly, a replacement SSD really isn't all that expensive, which is  
why I'm not afraid to beat the hell out of the one I've got. Sure, its  
more than an SD card, but for $150 today, I can replace my Aspire  
One's SSD w/one that has twice the capacity and 3x the performance. In  
another six months, it'll be half that for 6x the performance.

[...]
> In short, I would not buy any netbook without a dedicated SD card
> reader. I would also not buy any netbook with a Hard Drive since this
> has always been the failure point for all of my laptops.

Most of the netbook SSDs today are TERRIBLE performance-wise though,  
because they're tiny cheap ones using crappy controllers. I'd rather  
have a netbook with one of the 2.5" SATA SSDs that doesn't suck (i.e.,  
Intel X25-M, X25-E, something Samsung-based or the OCZ Vertex).

My ThinkPad T61 is rockin' an Intel X25-M right now (and loving it),  
and I just bought an OCZ Vertex to put in my main MythTV frontend box  
at home...

-- 
Jarod Wilson
jarod at wilsonet.com